Ghost stories

Remember “Nightmare on Elm Street”?

Remember when the girl woke up with the hat?

The concept of bringing things out of your dreams into your waking world is an interesting concept. Its already clear that we take things from our world into our dreams. We take our anxieties and our woes, our hopes and our passions. We also take an awareness of our world – people create a phone in their dream moments or minutes before it does ring on their bedside stands.

Most people certainly bring back their memory of the dream. Your body, your mind, bring back the benefits of the dream in sharper awareness and better critical thinking, based on the experiences in the dream.

You bring your energy state from your dream. If it was a monotonous dream, you wake exhausted. An happy dream, comforted and refreshed. People who have angry dreams often act-out while sleeping, bringing the flying fist into both worlds at once. And if you are falling and you hit ground….

So, what about bringing more tangible things back from dreamland?

It was one of the concepts I considered as a young teen, who was just learning the skills and concepts of lucid dreaming, and was curious about the concepts behind all kinds of arcane metaphysics.

Our home was a model home, a show home for our neighborhood when it opened. The builder had a custom plan called “the Apeano”. It was a 4-level split level home with a lot of space. The spec home however, he further customized, with a fifth level over the kitchen.

The room was a simple box with an intriguing closet space where the rest of the roof line met it. The hallway into the room – indeed, a great portion of the space behind the room’s door – was a hallway which barely fit in the apex of the normal roof line, and shared the slope of the roof down to your shoulder on one side.

The room itself then was only slightly smaller than the kitchen. It had two huge windows with unobstructed views into the interior of our neighborhood, and one of the windows opened onto the eave over the kitchen bay window and deck. This narrow eave made an excellent walkway over to the rest of the roof, which in turn gave quick access to the nearly flat roof over the room.

The roof of the fifth level was one of the highest points in the city, and the most treasured room in the house for 3 teenage boys, later two, then eventually, it was mine.

The roof of the fifth level was also bearer of a rough slat-cross during the last months of construction.

Construction workers do this to mark an accident – usually a death – or to ward against troublesome spirits. We were told “it was an accident”, and nothing more was said.

And, no more thought was given it. At least not for some years.

It was an early summer evening. Myself and my folks were all of the family that remained in my home; my older siblings had all moved on to college or spouces – thus I inherited the “upper room”, although I had been sleeping there for a couple of years already as my next oldest step-brother had “waived” his opportunity to move up.

So, I was accustomed to the room. I knew its idyosyncrocies, and its graces. We lived in tornado alley, and also two miles from a primary military nuclear target. I learned to sleep with an ear to the rumblings from outside my walls.

And on this night, after a fullfilling evening of dinner, movie, and card-playing with my folks, I was satisfied with the sounds I heard or didn’t hear, and drifted into an easy slumber.

I had been troubled over recent nights by having “boring” dreams. I would go to the beach, but it would be cloudy, and not many people. I would take a trip…to the cleaners. Very dull.

On this night, I was excited that while the context was mundane – I visited an old workplace – the actual event was interesting. I had dropped in on my old friends at the County Weed Department. It was housed in the lower level of a fantastic stone building, and the people were definately great characters.

In the dream it was near sunset on a cool summer evening. Several of us were standing in one of the garage bays, looking out the doors toward the skyline in the west, talking, and eventually moved more toward the interior of the building.

I was engaged in a witty repartee with a co-worker, when a young child interrupted for my attention. “Look!” she said, “You should see this”, and she gestured behind me, toward the open garage doors and the sunset.

I ignored the child, and continued to converse. The child was patient for a moment, until a brief lull in the verbage. Then she tugged at my left arm. “Mister, look! You really need to see this.”

“What?! I know its a pretty sunset!” Vexed, I allowed the child to pull me around so that the garage bay was at my 11-o-clock. My eyes followed her outstreched arm as she pointed toward the sunset and the horizon.

I scowled and was preparing a scolding remark, when something did catch my eye. The horizon wasn’t right. I looked again, and there were two mountains on the horizon, sillouhuetted against the setting sun. They were two peak, side by side, suggesting the form of an “m”.

I felt myself blanche in my dream.

This was an unscripted sequence.

My “controller”, my superego, the part of me that always ran in the background, began speaking to me. The controller was my protector. It is the slim fragment of my resting mind that listened for the freightrain of a tornado, or the sound of scrambling jets, as I slept. It was maintenance, it was oversight, it was defense. And it was speaking calmly – this is a situation.

I realized the child and the mountains had no place in my dream, no place in my mind right now. The controller began recalling me, talking me awake, but I could not take my eyes off the mountain peaks.

For as I roused from dream, and the invisble world faded toward the dull maroon of my eyelids…the mountain peaks remained.